I remember very well when I first heard about design thinking. It was 2013, eleven years ago, and as the first small-ticket venture acceleration programs were getting underway in Europe, including the Eleven Accelerator one that I was managing in Bulgaria, we first started hearing from corporations who wanted to implement the iterative startup development methodology, later becoming known under the umbrella term of “The Lean Startup”, for their own, corporate product and business development goals.
It turned out that in the few years before that, an entire movement had sprung up, obviously in Silicon Valley, that created a set of methods and practices for translating the Lean Startup playbook (back then still usually referred to as “The Four Steps to Epiphany”, after Steve Blank’s seminal 2005 book) for use in established and large businesses. The Stanford University design school had been relaunched in 2004 as the D.School, with a strong focus on design thinking research and teaching, and by 2012, the D.School expanded to Europe with the opening of its sister establishment, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design in Potsdam, near Berlin.
The name of Hasso Plattner, the founder of SAP, Germany’s tech giant and world leader in ERP systems, was there for a reason. SAP had experimented with startup-sourced product and business development methodologies for a long time, and it was Plattner who personally funded first the launch of the Stanford D.School, and then that of the Potsdam equivalent. For Plattner and SAP, building innovations with minimum resources, and based on iterations and feedback loops, was in their DNA.
It’s fantastic to see how that SAP legacy, many years later, led to an impressive company launched in Sofia, that we are privileged to have invested in with Vitosha.
In 2018, after 16 years at SAP Labs in Sofia, Dimitar Dimitrov left the mothership to launch his own company, Digital Lights, focusing on tailored solutions on top of ERP frameworks that he had so much experience with in his previous job. As his new company grew to over 100 employees across two locations in Bulgaria, he started sensing that some of the client projects he’d been working on with the new company, could be spun out into successful, independent products. One of these projects, christened TeamSchedule, got spun out in 2020, and has been successfully developing since as an independent company.
The idea behind TeamSchedule was to create the best possible solution for complex scheduling and time management of people, tasks, projects, and locations on top of the industry-standard SAP SuccessFactors HR platform, with as few as possible integration requirements. In 2023, Hristo Sabev, who was Dimitar’s colleague at SAP from the early days, joined the company as its CEO. Staying true to design thinking principles, Hristo set as the main guideline for TeamSchedule’s development a simple maxim: “If we build it, will they buy it?”, with a goal of securing 5 customers and 10,000 users before taking the product to venture capital investors.
After the company successfully reached this goal in 2022, we got introduced via mutual contacts in the venture space, and in 2023, we finalized our investment with Vitosha into TeamSchedule.
TeamSchedule joins a host of successful Vitosha portfolio companies who chose the sprawling Campus X startup office space in Sofia’s Mladost district as their base. As we walk around Building 3 at Campus X, Hristo and Dimitar explain the challenge of solving the scheduling of resources. “At its purest, it’s theoretically impossible to fully utilize the resources you have”, explains Hristo, referring to the well-known math problem of the traveling salesman. “But what you can do is to try to accomplish maximum efficiency. Within any organization, there are many constraints to the availability of a given resource, be it human or material. If you want to imagine an example, take the extreme case of an airline. You fly a plane from your home base to a foreign airport, and you need to ensure that you have the right crew for the outward leg, then a standby crew at the foreign airport that has rested enough to fly back the plane immediately, while you have to ensure that all the complex maintenance and supply procedures have been completed, as well as the loading with passengers and cargo. That’s an extreme example, that’s the Champions’ League of resource scheduling. But there are countless situations in less complex businesses all around us that require a similar, albeit more straightforward approach”.
Today, TeamSchedule has around 20,000 users across a host of clients in Europe and the MENA region, and the team is gearing up for the next round of expansion. With a headcount of six people based at Campus X, Hristo and his colleagues are eyeing not just new markets, but also a further development of the functionality. “The first thing we’ll do next to geographical expansion is create specific skins, as we call them, for specific industries that we come across while we work with our clients. Beyond that, artificial intelligence (AI) can really change things. Imagine running pattern discovery through a client’s workflow, where you take into account hundreds and thousands of documented and even undocumented factors, like weather conditions, traffic updates, and specific proficiencies of team members. And then improving the scheduling based on the findings. This is the future, and that’s what we want to build for our clients.”